Gay Christian

Gay Christian. Twenty years ago the two terms would never be seen next to each other. Today it’s a different story. This blog is about my twenty plus year struggle with the church and how I’ve come to reconcile it through the help of God. Ironic, isn’t it? Perhaps. Perhaps Not. I remember being a kid, around 12 years old. I would sit in church and observe humans judge other humans in the name of God. I would listen to the pastor condemn our behavior/my behavior as abominable and unacceptable. I thought, “how can I possibly succeed if I’ve already failed in this life?” If you sit back and think about it for a minute, those concepts really are a lot for a kid to swallow. I grew up listening to all of the classic christian songs. Hymns with rousing choruses that could feed your soul for weeks with just a single listen. Contemporary christian singers who would literally pray into the microphone. But I’ve come to realize that without the presence of God in my life I probably wouldn’t be here.

Without taking away from the special relationships people make with their gods, the word god is sort of like Kleenex or Über. We only sometimes say tissue, many of us say Kleenex, or certainly used to. We may take a taxi or a Lyft, but most of us from my generation still call it Über because it was the first of it’s kind to introduce a service many of us use in our daily lives. I would never presume that anyone believes the same thing I do, nor would I claim to understand enough about someone else’s faith to tell them what they believe is incorrect. I suppose that’s always been my biggest problem with religion—so much judgement wrapped up in all of it. For me, it’s always been about God. I’ve run from my God before. We probably all have at one point, I don’t know. But as I experience more aging, more empathy, more grief, more loss, more success, more truth, and more wisdom I know that God has always been there for me. I can proudly say I am a Gay Christian, because as the Bible says, we are made in God’s own image”, right?